By Del Quentin Wilber Washington Post Staff Writer WASHINGTON –– The DEA agents sat day after day in their smoke-filled command post in a Bucharest police station, checking their phones and e-mails for confirmation that one of the world’s most notorious arms dealers was coming. Their sting was an elaborate one, a ruse involving a…
By Shoshanna Utchenik ticklethewire.com It’s going to be a long time before international arms dealer Viktor Bout sees daylight again. The DEA announced late last week that Bout was sentenced in New York to 25 years in prison for conspiring to sell millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including hundreds of surface-to-air missiles and over…
By Danny Fenster ticklethewire.com After earning more than $9 million over the course of 15 years as one of the government’s highest paid informants in history, Carlos Sagastume unveiled his identity at the New York trial of international arms dealer Viktor Bout, reports the Associated Press. Bout’s month-long trial ended in a Manhattan federal court…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com From reputed Jamaican drug lord Christopher Coke to notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan has become aggressively global, indicting international figures from around the world, the New York Times reports. Since 2004, the Times’ Ben Weiser reports that the office has sent prosecutors to 25-plus…
(dea photo) By Allan Lengel For AOL News In the eyes of Russian officials, Viktor Bout is an innocent businessman being railroaded — quite contrary to the American view that he’s a cunning and dangerous arms dealer worthy of the moniker “Merchant of Death.” Clad in black T-shirt and black sweat pants, Bout briefly appeared…
